In recent years, touchscreen devices have become commonplace as personal mobile devices, such as mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and the like have gained in popularity. In addition to portable devices, touchscreens are being used in industry and in places such as cars and kiosks where keyboard-and-mouse systems do not allow fast, intuitive, or accurate interaction by the user with a display's content.
Touchscreen displays recognize user input by, for example, sensing touching (or tapping) of the screen, or by sensing a user's fingers or hand gestures in close proximity to the touchscreen. A touchscreen may be any surface onto which an image is projected, and from which a touch can be sensed. Touchscreens often employ virtual keyboards (or soft keyboards), which have virtual keys that are represented as specific areas of the touchscreen, rather than physical keys. When a user touches a virtual key on a screen, the touch system detects the touch, and then signals the system processor to update the appearance of the virtual keyboard to indicate to the user that the key touch/press has been registered, for example, by showing a highlighted or enlarged image of the virtual key. However, because the system processor also manages the other processes of the device (e.g., running the device's operating system and many other applications), response time required to update the appearance of the virtual keyboard can be slow, and there may be a noticeable lag between the time the user touches a key and the time that a visual feedback to the key press is provided to the user.